The invention relates to an error correction circuit of a type suitable for a receiving device for receiving digitally transmitted symbol information (picture and/or text), the transmission of this information being repeated one or more times, the receiving device comprising a deconding circuit for decoding the received information, an information store for storing the information, a circuit for generating synchronizing signals and a video converter circuit for converting information and synchronizing signals for applying a composite video signal to a standard television receiver, a symbol address in the information store corresponding with a symbol location on a television picture screen, a symbol location being a portion of a text line which is displayed with a number of videolines greater than one, the error correction circuit comprising means for checking newly received symbol information against symbol information stored in the information store for the corresponding symbol location, together with a write-switch having a write-setting circuit which determines whether the newly received information is written or not written into the information store, the position of the switch being determined on the basis of the result of said checking.
Error correction circuits of the above type are used in auxiliary apparatus for the reception of Teletext transmissions or comparable transmissions, these auxiliary apparatus being connected to a standard television receiver either by applying video signals to a so-called video input, or by applying these video signals, modulated on a carrier, to an aerial input of the television set. There are already television receivers with a built-in Teletext receiver already including an error correction circuit of the above-mentioned type.
The present Teletext system as it is already used rather widely in the UK, is based on an 8-bit symbol teletext code having 7 information bits and 1 parity bit; this parity bit is chosen so that each 8-bit symbol in the code has a so-called "odd" parity, that is to say there is an odd number of ones in a symbol, and, consequently, also an odd number of zeros. A display on the television picture screen comprises a "page" consisting of a number of rows (e.g. 24) of symbols.
Only symbols with the "odd" parity are stored in the information store. Each symbol represents either an alpha-numeric or a graphics character for display on the picture screen, or a control symbol.
If, in a subsequent transmission cycle for the same symbol location of the same page, a faulty symbol is detected, then, assuming that only a single error occurs within a symbol, this faulty symbol will have an even parity, that is to say a "one" changed into a "zero", or vice versa, as the result of the error. In this case the information store is not written into and the old information is retained in the relevant symbol address.
As the probability is very great that this old information is correct, the parity check does not only furnish an error detection, but also an error correction, partly because of the fact that some knowledge has already been gained from the previous history. Of course, this does not hold for the first transmission cycle. Should an "even" parity be found in a 8-bit symbol in the first transmission cycle, a space ("blank") is generally recorded in the relevant symbol address and, consequently, displayed as a space. The easiest way to do this is by filling the entire information store with space symbols when a new Teletext page is requested, so that also in the first cycle no information need be written into the information store on receipt of a symbol having an "even" parity.
For a poor transmission condition an error probability of 0.01 is assumed, that is to say one symbol out of a hundred symbols is received incorrectly. In a complete page having 960 Teletext symbol locations, (i.e. up to 24 rows of up to 40 symbols per row) the displayed page then shows, after the first cycle, 9 to 10 erroneous spaces on average. In the present system substantially all these erroneous spaces are likely to have been corrected in the second cycle.
When the receiving conditions are better, this situation is already correspondingly more favourable in the first cycle. Even in the poorest receiving conditions, it appears that the number of double errors is so small that they may be neglected. Double errors therefore are hardly ever taken into consideration hereafter. It will be apparent that in this system each symbol has a certain degree of redundancy in the form of the parity bit, but this is off-set by the drawback that the 8-bit code, which has 256 (=2.sup.8) combinations, is utilized for only 50% of this capacity, i.e. only for the 128 symbols having "odd" parity.
Although, for the U.K. itself, such a code has a sufficient capacity to contain all desired symbols for control, graphics elements, letters, figures, punctuation marks, etc. as required for Teletext and also, for example, for Viewdata, it is not possible to allot a specific symbol to all of the special characters occurring in various other languages.
Several European languages, in so far they are written in latin characters, have all sorts of "extra" characters, for example Umlaut letters, accent letters, etc. When all these extra characters are totalled, including Icelandic, Maltese and Turkish, then it appears that a total of approximately 220 symbols is required, namely the 128 known symbols plus further symbols for these "extra" characters.
Several solutions have been proposed to solve this, but so far none of these have been satisfactory as they are either very cumbersome or allow only one language within one page, so that it is impossible or very difficult e.g. to quote foreign names in a page of text.
Alternatively it has been proposed--and this is of course very obvious--to use the entire 8-bit code for symbols. As the redundancy in the code has now been reduced to zero, no correction can be effected in the second cycle. If two codes for one symbol location differ from one another in different transmission cycles, it is theoretically impossible to decide with certainty which one of the two codes is correct. An additional information store is required to enable a comparison between a newly received symbol in the third cycle and a symbol from the second and the first cycles, and to take the frequently used majority decision thereafter. This is possible, but three reading cycles are necessary before the number of errors is reduced to an acceptable level. As each transmission cycle of a completely full magazine (i.e. a plurality of pages) takes approximately 25 seconds, the correct text is not known until after approximately 75 seconds.
As the present system displays the text correctly after approximately 50 seconds already, such a solution would mean an increase in the so-called access time.
If a new parity bit were added to the 8-bit code, each symbol would require 8+1=9 bits so that it is no longer possible, as is done in the present system, to accommodate the symbols for one text line of 40 characters in one video line, whereas on the other hand the average transmission rate decreases if more video lines are needed for the information transmission. This solution is generally considered to be unacceptable, also because the compatibility with existing receivers would be fully lost.
Although any language to be displayed can be considered to contain redundancy both as regards text and graphics, so that a viewer may "overlook" many errors, in the sense that there is still an intelligible display, this does not offer a satisfactory solution.